Sunday, April 19, 2015

Buddies 2015, a joint publication between The Providence Comics Consortium and Hidden Fortress Press, is an anthology collecting the work of 46 Providence based cartoonists. It exists more as a “scene report” than an anthology though, without any major thematic focus (outside of the lasting resonance of Fort Thunder on the area) or narrative constraint.

The format gives each artists involved between two and eight pages to tell their stories, this, like in many anthologies, leads many contributors to craft more joke orientated work that by and large fall flat or never reach a point. Joe DeGeorge’s two pager, centering around a clam doing hack clam puns on stage at a comedy club is the only entry i can remember laughing at, and only because of my continued love of horrible puns.

Brian Chippendale’s entry should also be noted for it’s humor, although it operates as more than just a humor strip. Written under the pseudonym Barry Manowar and titled ‘Ghostmace Killa in Quicksand’, it takes place over three single image pages showing a large warrior wielding a mace walking out of a jungle environment only to be quickly (in the third panel/page) enveloped by quicksand and disappear under its surface.

By obscuring his name with such a bombastic pseudonym, along with his choice of title, one is lead to believe a more hearty comic is going to take place but it’s brevity creates an ironic joke, playing into the fact that it appears as a short in an already packed anthology and is, as an addendum to the title, presented by “Puke Force” Chippendale’s long in the works follow up to Iff ’n oof making its abrupt ending a fairly pointed statement about page length and time.

(The story also reminds me of Chester Brown’s Walrus Blubber Sandwich which ends in a flying saucer crashing into the main characters skull after the third page ending the story abruptly and without any real reason for its existence. Later in an interview with The Comics Journal Brown confessed the reasoning was him not wanting to draw the remaining 17 pages he had planned* due his being bored with the subject. Although i’m doubtful Chippendale became bored with his own story, the two seem intertwined to some degree in my mind that i felt beard mentioning.)

One of the more interesting aspects of Buddies 2015 resides on the production side with the choice to alternate between the colors green, blue and purple both between pages and on a single page at a time. Maren Jensen utilizes this formatting choice most effectively in a story about ones disengagement with their own body in a search for something else. In telling this short Jensen utilizes the replication and overlapping of drawings of a single figure in varying poses along with garbled, almost poetically disconnected text, as the colors begin to vary between a deep shade to a more washed out one as the blue tinge that separates each color seeps in and out of the page. The changing colors create a literalization to the texts focus on shifting from ones body to another by shifting from one shade to another.

*Chester Brown from TJC: That one “Walrus Blubber Sandwich” [Yummy Fur #1] was actually intended to be a longer story. I wrote a script for it and if I’d drawn it the way the script said it would’ve been 20 pages or something. I got to the third page and I was saying to myself, “I have another 17 pages of this to do?” So I just had that flying saucer come down and kill the guy, and that’s the end of the story.

Thursday, April 2, 2015

While traveling too RIPE I was reading the recently deceased David Carr’s auto-biography. In a passage towards the end he speaks about his treatment for cancer, and the increasing use of “it” as a way for other people to distance themselves from the actual disease he was suffering from:

“There was enough evidence in all that concern that I began to think I had a case of ‘It’, instead of cancer. How is It going? Did they get all of It? What’s Its status? Oh, do you mean this giant cancerous tumor on my neck that is tipping my head over? ‘It’ seems to be doing fine.”

Presence is a four page comic revolving around the idea of “It” invading one's world and of the possibility of "It" leaving one's life. Of trying to deal with an outside force as it becomes all consuming to you. “It” is never defined, and every time that “it” is mentioned the word appears to be muddled by Robinson through the overlaying of the words “She & He” on top of “It”. Whenever some sense of clarity is about to become apparent a thick black line appears over the word in question and creates a murky sense of unknowing, until most of the panels in the comic, and in the end an entire page, becomes one giant blend of crossed out lines.

By injecting “She" and "He” into the coldness of “It” Robinson is creating an attempt at intimacy that the rest of the narrative is folding in on itself to avoid. “Love” is crossed out to “Rely On” because “Rely On” removes the intimacy that Love does, although there duties seem to overlap with each other to a great extent.

Presence isn’t about cancer though, it’s about a breakup. Or a future breakup. But doubt is a cancer all its own. It festers and grows and at the end it becomes something else. Presence captures this and attempts to grow upon it as an idea to great effect.

On the second page of Small Talk a
figure states “ I saw everything too correctly, so i had to invent an
insane language.” Urkowitz’s collection of sketchbook pages and finished
drawings skirts between the line of decadent and minimalist,
pornographic and wholesome, abstract and representative. While he may
not have created a new language Urkowitz certainly pushes his own ideas
to a point where he very well may have created his own dialect.

A mini comic of one page paintings. Each image shows the inversion of the next, so that the figure dressed as the moon is flanked by a figure dressed as the sun and the figure dressed as the sea is followed by a figure dressed as a fish.

Pageant as a title brings to mind a childrens school recital, which Weber’s drawings further evoke by emphasizing the handmade qualities of these costumes. Instead of mocking the limits of these costumes though Weber creates a sincerity within her paintings that reminds me of Maurice Sendak's WIld the Things Are. You can see the artistic seams, but those seams seem to be a central part of the work.

Opening on what seems to be a prison camp and then quickly moving to an underwater seabed Gardens evokes, across every page, the feeling of what a garden is while constantly changing the geographical context that an actual garden can be found in.

Weber’s plump figures and water colors create an odd intimacy. A spread showing a sunlight yellow creates the feeling of spring almost immediately upon viewing it, while the larger than lifeness of her figures and flowers create a childlike viewing of nature. Flowers, trees and adults are impossibly tall, yet feel perfectly in concert with each other.

Top of the Mountin’ Mountin is a superhero comic of sorts. Opening on a foreign circular object coming from space and reshaping a mountain into a cylindrical shape until a superhero begins to fight it off. Each page results in the grid of the page doubling, so that the first pages four panel grid becomes an eight on the next eventually resulting in a sixty-four panel final page that replicates the dislocated and frantic nature of most modern super-hero comics where the narrative becomes muddled and leaves the reader confused and dissociated.

I am glad Crowe, in a throwaway joke, pointed out the phallic nature of the aliens mountain transformation too.

(Still the best webcomic of 2014. What follows is a reposting of what i wrote about it last year)

The previous three issues of Sex Fantasy could be seen as a set up for this issue, lulling the reader into a false sense of knowing. What started as a gag comic about outlandish sex fantasies slowly transformed over its previous three issues into a exploration as to what those fantasies reveal about the person acting them out, and what ones inner thoughts and anxieties play into them.

Sex Fantasy #4 opens with an unnamed female sitting on a couch, wearing a black sweater and reading a book. Quickly though a pair of arms shoot through the left panel border and another female, this one wearing glasses, begins to rest her head on the woman on the couches right shoulder and lock her hands together around the woman's neck in a loose hug of sorts. The intimacy of this gesture seems to implicate a closeness between the two figures, and as the previous three issues have conditioned you to expect, you await the figure in glasses to begin whispering her odd sex fantasies into the sitting womans ear.

The fantasies you expect to see here though never come, although the intimacy of the statements are nonetheless present, as the figure in glasses begins to reveal the deeply held thoughts and anxieties of the woman on the couch. These thoughts though are couched (ha ha) by the phrasing “have you ever…” at the beginning of each statement, creating the illusion of a question being asked, when in reality none is.

As each word piles up the woman on the couch begins to sob uncontrollably. This reaction doesn’t seem to affect the woman in glasses though, as her body language and facial expression never changes over the course of the comic. That is except for the ever so slightest raising and lowering of her eyebrows. These movements are meant more to telegraph how each new bit of information will hit her target though, rather then show characterization. So as her eyebrows move upwards you see her words begin leading towards something, until they snap back down into a focused and flat lined stare as she delivers the crushing conclusion to the newest perverse iteration of “have you ever…”.

It isn’t until the comics final page, when a new and grotesque looking figure enters through the right side of the panel that the woman in glasses leaves. Mirroring the woman in glasses movements, only this time in reverse, this new figure rests her head on the sitting womans left shoulder and begins to comfort her instead of emotionally abusing her. Gently placing her left hand on the sitting womens shoulder and, after a brief hug, telling her to “go to bed.” in the narratives only thought to end in a period.

The angel/devil paradigm this story is evoking is interesting, first in the flipping of the imagery of each player (the devil character being depicted as a well dressed 20-something female and the angel being represented by a ghoulish looking woman), but also by subverting the roles each play. While the devil in this classic scenario tends to whisper evil ideas into the main characters ear and push them to do something outwardly bad, here she whispers ideas that sink the character deeper into herself; and while the angel typically counteracts these ideas by explaining the harm they would cause to others, here all she can do is bring her back to her normal state of mind. This leaves the experience feeling not so much as a resolution to the devils words, but rather a momentary respite.